I often joke that my mobile phone is my other brain, but that is truer than I would care to admit.

Yesterday I lost my iPhone.  I volunteer at a thrift store sorting, cleaning, and assembling donated toys.  My partner is a wonderful woman, and the two of us have loads of fun at our task.  We often have to look up the value of items on eBay, so we keep our phones at the ready. 

I ran a few errands after I left the thrift store, but went I finally arrived home I realized that I didn’t have my phone with me.  Luckily, my Apple Watch has a handy icon I can push which causes my iPhone to chime.  Unluckily, there was no response when I pushed it. Ugh. Where could my phone be?

I raced back to the thrift store and got someone to let me in, but after a frantic search, I found nothing.

What could I do?  I came back home and used the location finder on the computer.  I marked the phone was lost and began tracing it on a map.  Once you mark the phone lost, it freezes all the apps on the phone, especially your Apple Wallet.

All this is wonderful, but at this point I was totally incommunicado. How could I contact anyone, even if I could remember their phone number?  Yikes! 

I checked the location map again.  Egads! The phone was moving closer to my house!  This was great news!

The only problem was that I had to pick up my granddaughter Adeline at her writing camp which was almost an hour’s drive away.  What to do?

At that moment my son called me, and I was able to answer it on my Apple Watch, aka my Dick Tracy 2-way wrist radio.  He offered to go to get Adeline but at that moment I checked the map, and my phone was moving closer to my house. 

Mystery solved!  My partner in Toyland had inadvertently put my phone in her bag.  She joked that she was a klepto who usually stole pens, but she was upping her game.  I was so relieved to get my brain—I mean phone—back that all was forgiven.

I hopped in my car and zoomed down the street, happy to be on my way, albeit a few minutes behind schedule.  I called my son and gave him the latest update.  Then suddenly I looked up to see a black and white car with red flashing lights right behind me.  Could this day get any better?

I pulled over and a young man in a uniform strode up to my driver’s side window.  I think they are letting middle school kids work as cops in the summer.  At any rate, he was very polite and asked me if I knew what the speed limit was.  I sure did.  It is 25 mph, which in my opinion is absurdly slow.  And do you know how fast you were going?  He had me there. I had no idea, but he was kind enough to inform me that I was traveling at 41 mph.  Not exactly a high-speed chase, but he had me.  Luckily, I was only given a verbal warning.

I was only five minutes late to camp and I had my iPhone back.  What more could a girl ask for?